Matt Johnson (PNP) via tz wrote:
So would you recommend then that when Russia moved from 11 zones to 9 zones and back to 11 that the zones would be renumbered to correspond with those changes? (eg, RTZ5 becoming RTZ6?) And if so, is that what people in the region would have agreed with at the time? Would they have said "we were in the 5th time zone, now we're in the 6th time zone" (in Russian) ?
As far as I am concerned, people in Russia and in Russian mostly use the offset from MSK to refer to their timezone. So people in Tomsk say "We have been in the MSK+3 zone and now we are in the MSK+4 zone". Sometimes we also refer to timezones by their major city, like "Novosibirsk time". Offset from UTC is not popular with the public here, unless you are an engineer of some kind, or an amateur radio operator etc. -- Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN sip:sudakov@sibptus.tomsk.ru